AKA Foods has officially launched AKA Studio, a proprietary AI platform engineered to significantly accelerate product development cycles. This follows the successful closure of a $17.2 million (£13.8 million) seed funding round. The funding was spearheaded by AI experts Alex and Michael Bronstein, aiming to introduce a transformative technology at the confluence of AI, food science, and sensory evaluation. This innovation is poised to revolutionise how consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies conduct research, formulation, and optimisation of food and beverage products.
Designed to address the food industry’s challenges in effectively utilising extensive organisational knowledge, AKA Studio consolidates internal R&D, experimental data, ingredient specifications, and regulatory documentation into a cohesive digital framework. This system uniquely integrates sensory evaluation and analytical measurements concerning texture, aroma, and taste, deploying sophisticated AI assistants to guide formulation and optimisation processes.
The platform offers substantial benefits for R&D teams and manufacturers. It dramatically shortens the innovation cycle from years to mere weeks, offering high-quality decision support. It also enables precise reformulation, allowing for scientific optimisation of key challenges, including achieving clean labels, reducing sugar and fat content, and enhancing supply chain resilience. Furthermore, it transforms fragmented internal data into measurable innovation assets, thereby boosting organisational productivity and profitability.
Professor Alex Bronstein, the chief scientist at AKA Foods, highlighted the system’s proprietary nature: “AKA Foods is essentially bringing to market a new type of grammar; a language for food, creating AI agents that are capable of connecting to different external data sources and then making recommendations on how to improve the recipe. This is something that a generic AI model like ChatGPT will never be able to achieve.”
Given the competitive nature of formulation data, security and confidentiality are integral to AKA Studio’s design. The platform operates as a secure software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution, ensuring clients maintain private environments for their data. For organisations requiring the highest security standards, the system can be deployed on-premise and air-gapped. AKA Foods guarantees that client data is never shared or used for external model training, with clients retaining full ownership and control of their proprietary information.
David Sack, founder and CEO of AKA Foods, stated, “This investment allows us to expand deployment to enterprise clients worldwide and continue advancing the science behind how food is created. AKA Studio gives companies the ability to capture, organise, and apply that knowledge securely.”
The underlying Sensory-AI framework is also noted for its potential application in other precision formulation sectors, including flavours.
